I chose to study Rita due to the sense of identity in her portraits of still life items. While there is no human subject in the photo, it is still structured like a traditional portrait allowing the photos to tell a story behind the object while leaving an air of ambiguity around the photos.

As far as technical aspects of the images go, they are structured like a typical portrait with soft lighting to avoid harsh shadows and a typically larger aperture to allow for a narrow depth of field while still allowing for a wide DoF in wider shots. She also appears to use a slower shutter speed due to the strong contrast and colors in the photos. The subjects in most of her photos are centralized in the image creating a fell of importance to the subjects. It looks as though her images could made using film due to the slight grain and Gaussian blur. The lower images seems to be exhibiting bokeh as well also suggesting that this is taken on film.

Images Sampled from Rita’s Book ‘Where Mimosa Bloom’

I like the idea of taking a portrait of a statue as it allows for exploration of traditional portraiture techniques while still sticking with the idea of still life portraiture and I believe that the broken statue can tell a much more powerful story than a traditional portrait.

Zhao Xiaomeng took many photographs of abandoned bikes scattered across the streets of Beijing. I personally like how much about someones personality you can tell from the scattered bikes, they all have various adjustments and additions made to make the previous owners life just a little bit easier. I like the compositions of the images as I like how somewhat abstract still life photography is being framed as though it is a traditional portrait, with rather blank backgrounds to allow the subject to strongly contrast it. Most of the subjects have some strong color either from the weathered paint or the rust patina. It looks as though he has used a small aperture due to the wide depth of field, as a consequence of this I believe that the photos were taken using a long shutter speed and low ISO due to the amount of detail captured in the photos. The photos are rather de-saturated but still show color depth.

John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) was a German photographer best know for his work in photo-montage. Much of his most famous works were anti fascist/Nazi statements. He used the political nature of his photography as a form of visual art to use as a “political weapon”. John was a prominent figure in the style of photography known as dadaism.

Some of his photo-montage featured various pieces of artwork in conjunction with various photographs. the majority of his photography is borrowed however combines the photos/artwork into a powerful political statement.

“The cross was not yet heavy enough”

This piece uses explicit religious imagery to convey the Nazi’s as an enemy of Christ.

Not much can be said for the technical aspects of John’s photography since much of the photographs used are borrowed however the photos are put together simply by cutting and pasting while occasionally painting/drawing directly onto the frames.

“Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with These Stultifying Bandages!”

This piece is much different to the rest of John’s work as it doesn’t utilize traditional photo-montage and instead is a more traditional photo as this was a photo-shoot that was setup primarily for this shot and isn’t a combination of images. The photo is framed like many portraits taken of Nazi officials however it features a German newspaper wrapped around his head suggesting that the German people are so absorbed by the news that they are a slave to the media, this is also implied by the attire of the subject which suggests that they are being incarcerated. The photo is essentially telling the viewer that the Bourgeois news was heavily biased and will leave the reader with a closed mind.

2 portraits of Erwin Rommel of similar composition to the piece by John

For this photo-shoot I primarily experimented using one point lighting in order to create a subtle chiaroscuro effect, I decided to be subtle about this effect as I wanted to have as many options available for editing as possible. With some of the later photos in the shoot i decided to make the effect more evident as i had a set idea for the look of the photos and thus wanted to minimize the amount of unnecessary editing I would have to do afterwards.

My personal favorites of the shoot are:

7564

7571

7544

These are mainly because i like the composition of the images and i like how the lighting complimented the colors in frame. The lighting created a good amount of vibrancy while not leaving the image over saturated. I also like the photo 7542 however i found that the lighting in that image required too much retouching and the edits became very evident.